Indo-European languagesfamily of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia. The term Indo-Hittite is used by scholars who believe that Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are not just one branch of Indo-European but rather a branch coordinate with all the rest put together; thus, Indo-Hittite has been used for a family consisting of Indo-European proper plus Anatolian. As long as this view is neither definitively proved nor disproved, it is convenient to keep the traditional use of the term Indo-European.

Languages of the family

The well-attested languages of the Indo-European family fall fairly neatly into the 10 main branches listed below; these are arranged according to the age of their oldest sizable texts.

Anatolian

Now extinct, Anatolian was spoken during the 1st and 2nd millennia bc in what is presently Asian Turkey and northern Syria. By far the best-known of its members is Hittite, the official language of the Hittite empire, which flourished in the 2nd millennium. Very few Hittite texts were known before 1906, and their interpretation as Indo-European was not generally accepted until after 1915; the integration of Hittite data into Indo-European comparative grammar has, therefore, been one of the principal developments of Indo-European studies in the 20th century. The oldest Hittite texts date from the 17th century bc, the latest from approximately 1200 bc. For more information, see Anatolian languages.

Indo-Iranian

Indo-Iranian comprises two main subbranches, Indo-Aryan (Indic) and Iranian. Indo-Aryan languages have been spoken in what is now northern and central India and Pakistan since before 1000 bc. Aside from a very poorly known dialect spoken in or near northern Iraq during the 2nd millennium bc, the oldest record of an Indo-Aryan language is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda (Ṛgveda), the oldest of the sacred scriptures of India, dating roughly from 1000 bc. Examples of modern Indo-Aryan languages are Hindī, Bengali, Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka), and the many dialects of Romany, the language of the Gypsies (Rom).

Iranian languages were spoken in the 1st millennium bc in present-day Iran and Afghanistan and also in the steppes to the north, from modern Hungary to East (Chinese) Turkistan. The only well-known ancient varieties of Iranian languages are Avestan, the sacred language of the Zoroastrians (Parsis), and Old Persian, the official language of Darius I (ruled 522–486 bc) and Xerxes I (486–465 bc) and their successors. Among the modern Iranian languages are Persian (Fārsī), Pashto (Afghan), Kurdish, and Ossetic. For more information, see Indo-Iranian languages.

Greek

Greek, despite its numerous dialects, has been a single language throughout its history. It has been spoken in Greece since at least 1600 bc, and, in all probability, since the end of the 3rd millennium. The earliest texts are the Linear B tablets, some of which may date from as far back as 1400 bc (the date is disputed), and some of which certainly date to 1200 bc. This material, very sparse and difficult to interpret, was not identified as Greek until 1952. The Homeric epics—the Iliad and the Odyssey—probably dating from the 8th century bc, are the oldest texts of any bulk. For more information, see Greek language.

Italic

The principal language of the Italic group is Latin, originally the speech of the city of Rome and the ancestor of the modern Romance languages: Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and so on. The earliest Latin inscriptions apparently date from the 6th century bc, with literature beginning in the 3rd century. Scholars are not in agreement as to how many other ancient languages of Italy and Sicily belong in the same branch as Latin. For more information on Latin, the languages derivedbcfrom it, and the other languages that belong to or are sometimes included in the Italic branch of Indo-European, see Italic languages and Romance languages.

Germanic

In the middle of the 1st millennium bc, Germanic tribes lived in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. Their expansions and migrations from the 2nd century bc onward are largely recorded in history. The oldest Germanic language of which much is known is the Gothic of the 4th century ad. Other languages include English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. For more information, see Germanic languages and English language.

Armenian

Armenian, like Greek, is a single language. Speakers of Armenian are recorded as being in what now constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia as early as the 6th century bc, but the oldest Armenian texts date from the 5th century ad. For more information, see Armenian language.

Tocharian

The Tocharian languages, now extinct, were spoken in the Tarim Basin (in present-day northwestern China) during the 1st millennium ad. Two distinct languages are known, labeled A (East Tocharian, or Turfanian) and B (West Tocharian, or Kuchean). One group of travel permits for caravans can be dated to the early 7th century, and it appears that other texts date from the same or from neighbouring centuries. These languages became known to scholars only in the first decade of the 20th century; they have been less important for Indo-European studies than has Hittite, partly because their testimony about the Indo-European parent language is obscured by 2,000 more years of change and partly because Tocharian testimony fits fairly well with that of the previously known non-Anatolian languages. For more information, see Tocharian languages.

Celtic

Celtic languages were spoken in the last centuries before the Christian era over a wide area of Europe, from Spain and Britain to the Balkans, with one group (the Galatians) even in Asia Minor. Very little of the Celtic of that time and the ensuing centuries has survived, and this branch is known almost entirely from the Insular Celtic languages—Irish, Welsh, and others—spoken in and near the British Isles, as recorded from the 8th century ad onward. For further information, see Celtic languages.

Balto-Slavic

The grouping of Baltic and Slavic into a single branch is somewhat controversial, but the exclusively shared features outweigh the divergences. At the beginning of the Christian Era, Baltic and Slavic tribes occupied a large area of eastern Europe, east of the Germanic tribes and north of the Iranians, including much of present-day Poland and what was formerly the western Soviet Union—namely, Belarus, Ukraine, and westernmost Russia. The Slavic area was in all likelihood relatively small, perhaps centred in what is now southern Poland. But in the 5th century ad the Slavs began expanding in all directions. By the end of the 20th century the Slavic languages were spoken throughout much of eastern Europe and northern Asia. The Baltic-speaking area, however, contracted, and by the end of the 20th century Baltic languages were confined to Lithuania and Latvia.

The earliest Slavic texts, written in a dialect called Old Church Slavonic, date from the 9th century ad; the oldest substantial material in Baltic dates to the end of the 14th century, and the oldest connected texts to the 16th century. For more information, see Baltic languages and Slavic languages.

Albanian

Albanian, the language of the present-day republic of Albania, is known from the 15th century ad. It presumably continues one of the very poorly attested ancient Indo-European languages of the Balkan Peninsula, but which one is not clear. For more information, see Albanian language.

In addition to the principal branches just listed, there are several poorly documented extinct languages of which enough is known to be sure that they were Indo-European and that they did not belong in any of the groups enumerated above (e.g., Phrygian, Macedonian). Of a few, too little is known to be sure whether they were Indo-European or not (e.g., Ligurian).

Establishment of the family

Shared characteristics

The chief reason for grouping the Indo-European languages together is that they share a number of items of basic vocabulary, including grammatical affixes, whose shapes in the different languages can be related to one another by statable phonetic rules. Especially important are the shared patterns of alternation of sounds. Thus the agreement of Sanskrit ás-ti, Latin es-t, and Gothic is-t, all meaning ‘is,’ is greatly strengthened by the identical reduction of the root to s- in the plural in all three languages: Sanskrit s-ánti, Latin s-unt, Gothic s-ind ‘they are.’ Agreements in pure structure, totally divorced from phonetic substance, are, at best, of dubious value in proving membership in the Indo-European family.

Table 1 gives examples of typical vocabulary items widely shared within the Indo-European family that have been decisive in establishing the family. A blank indicates that the language in question does not use the item in accordance with the given meaning or that its word for that meaning is unknown.

Similarities in grammatical endings are shown in Table 2 by samples of noun declension and verb inflection in some of the more archaic languages that have retained the inflectional endings of Indo-European in relatively unchanged form. Note that Old Lithuanian -į and -ų were nasalized vowels, representing a continuation from the earlier forms *-in and *-un. (The asterisk marks a form that is not actually found in any document or living dialect but is reconstructed as having once existed in the prehistory of the language.)

The statable phonetic rules referred to earlier are not always obvious without careful observation. Note that the English dental consonants t, d, and th do not correspond in a straightforward manner to the Greek dental sounds t, d, and th; that is, English t does not occur where Greek t appears, nor English d where Greek has d. But the relationships between the sounds are not random either—English t does not correspond to Greek t in one word, to d in a second, and to th in a third, according to no discernible pattern. Rather, where Greek has initial t, English has th, as in that and three; where Greek has d, English has t, as in tree, two, and ten; and where Greek has th, English has d, as in daughter. Note also that phonetic similarity as such is not needed to establish relationship. Thus, many of the Armenian words in Table 1 look quite different from the related words in other Indo-European languages, but here too regular rules of correspondence can be found; e.g., Greek initial p corresponds to Armenian h or zero (lack of a consonant) in the words meaning ‘fire,’ ‘father,’ ‘foot,’ and ‘five.’

Sanskrit studies and their impact

The ancient Greeks and Romans readily perceived that their languages were related to each other, and, as other European languages became objects of scholarly attention in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, many of these were seen to be more similar to Latin and Greek than, for example, to Hebrew or Hungarian. But an accurate idea of the true bounds of the Indo-European family became possible only when, in the 16th century, Europeans began to learn Sanskrit. The massive similarities between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek were noted early, but the first person to make the correct inference and state it conspicuously was the British Orientalist and jurist Sir William Jones, who in 1786 said in his presidential address to the Bengal Asiatic Society that Sanskrit bore to both Greek and Latin

a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [i.e., Germanic] and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family . . . .

Nineteenth-century linguists firmly established the connections that Jones had elucidated and broadened the family to include Slavic, Baltic, and other language groups. In 1816 Franz Bopp, the German philologist, presented his Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (“On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit, in Comparison with Those of Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic”), in which the relation of these five languages was demonstrated on the basis of a detailed comparison of verb morphology (structure). Two years later there appeared the Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language), by the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask, completed in 1814. This work demonstrated methodically the relation of Germanic to Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Baltic. (Rask included Celtic a few years later.) In 1822 the second edition of the first volume of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (“Germanic Grammar”) was published; in this grammar were discussed the peculiar Indo-European vowel alternations called Ablaut by Grimm (e.g., English “sing, sang, sung”; or Greek peíth-ō ‘I persuade,’ pé-poith-a ‘I am persuaded,’ é-pith-on ‘I persuaded’). In addition, Grimm tried to find the principle behind the correspondences of Germanic stop and spirant consonants (the first made with complete stoppage of the breath, and the second made with constriction of the breath but not complete stoppage) to the consonants of other Indo-European languages. The sound changes implied by these correspondences have become known as Grimm’s law. Examples of it include the stop consonant p in Latin pater corresponding to the spirant consonant f in father, and the correspondences between English and Greek t, d, and th discussed above.

Bopp demonstrated in 1839 that the Celtic languages were Indo-European, as had been asserted by Jones. In 1850 the German philologist August Schleicher did the same for Albanian, and in 1877 another German philologist, Heinrich Hübschmann, showed that Armenian was an independent branch of Indo-European, rather than a member of the Iranian subbranch. Since then, the Indo-European family has been enlarged by the discovery of Tocharian and of Hittite and the other Anatolian languages, and by the recognition, with the aid of Hittite, that Lycian, known and partly deciphered already in the 19th century, belongs to the Anatolian branch of Indo-European.

The Indo-European character of Tocharian was announced by the German scholars Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling in 1908. The Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon recognized Hittite as Indo-European on the basis of two letters found in Egypt (translated in Die zwei Arzawa-briefe [1902; “The Two Arzawa Letters”]), but his views were not generally accepted until 1915, when Bedřich Hrozný published the first report of his own decipherment of the much more copious material that had meanwhile been found in the ruins of the Hittite capital itself.

The first full comparative grammar of the major Indo-European languages was Bopp’s Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (1833–52; “Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German”). But this and August Schleicher’s shorter Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (1861–62; “Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages”) were rendered obsolete by the major breakthrough of the 1870s, when scholars—prompted largely by the discoveries of a group of German scholars known as Neogrammarians—realized that sound correspondences are not merely rules of thumb that do not have to be strictly observed, but that apparent exceptions to sound laws can often be accounted for by stating them more accurately or by reconstructing additional different sounds in the parent language. The difference between Gothic d in fadar ‘father’ and in broar ‘brother,’ for example, both corresponding to t in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, proved to be correlated with the original position of the accent, a discovery known as Verner’s law (named for the Danish linguist Karl Verner). Thus, d appears when the preceding syllable was originally unaccented (fadar : Greek patér-, Sanskrit pitár-), and occurs when the preceding syllable was originally accented (broar : Greek phrā́ter- ‘member of a clan,’ Sanskrit bhrā́tar-).

The knowledge and opinions that had accumulated by the end of the 19th century are largely incorporated in the German linguist Karl Brugmann’s Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (2nd ed., 1897–1916; “Outline of Comparative Indo-European Grammar”), which remains the latest full-scale treatment of the family.

The parent language: Proto-Indo-European

By comparing the recorded Indo-European languages, especially the most ancient ones, much of the parent language from which they are descended can be reconstructed. This reconstructed parent language is sometimes called simply Indo-European, but in this article the term Proto-Indo-European is preferred.

Phonology

Consonants

Proto-Indo-European probably had 15 stop consonants. In the following grid these sounds are arranged according to the place in the mouth where the stoppage was made and the activity of the vocal cords during and immediately after the stoppage:

A “labial” sound is made with the lips, and a “dental” sound with the tip of the tongue against the back of the teeth. The “palatal” and “velar” sounds were probably made by contact between the back of the tongue and the soft palate—more toward the front of the mouth in the case of the palatals and more toward the back in the case of the velars (compare Arabic kalb ‘dog’ versus qalb ‘heart’). The “labiovelar” sounds were made by contact between the back of the tongue and the soft palate with concomitant rounding of the lips. “Voiceless” designates sounds made without vibration of the vocal cords; “voiced” sounds are pronounced with vibration of the vocal cords. The exact pronunciation of the “voiced aspirates” is somewhat uncertain; they were probably similar to the sounds transcribed bh, dh, and gh in Hindī.

Correspondences pointing to the voiced labial stop b are rare, leading some scholars to deny that b existed at all in the parent language. A minority view holds that the traditionally reconstructed voiced stops were actually glottalized sounds produced with accompanying closure of the vocal cords. The status of the velar stops k, g, and gh has likewise been questioned. The earlier view that Proto-Indo-European had a series of voiceless aspirated stops ph, th, ḱh, kh, and kwh has largely been abandoned. (Aspirated consonants are sounds accompanied by a puff of breath.) There was one sibilant consonant, s, with a voiced alternant, z, that occurred automatically next to voiced stops. The existence of a second apical spirant, (presumed pronunciation like that of th in English thin), is extremely uncertain.

There is general agreement that Proto-Indo-European had one or more additional consonants, for which the label “laryngeal” is used. These consonants, however, have mostly disappeared or have become identical with other sounds in the recorded Indo-European languages, so that their former existence has had to be deduced mainly from their effects on neighbouring sounds. Hence, the laryngeal sounds were not suspected until 1878, and even then they were rejected by most scholars until after 1927, when the Polish linguist Jerzy Kuryłowicz showed that Hittite often has ḫ (perhaps a velar spirant like the ch in German ach) in places where a laryngeal had been posited on the evidence of the other Indo-European languages. There is still considerable disagreement about how many laryngeals there were, what they sounded like, what traces they left, and how best to symbolize them. Most scholars now believe there were three, which can be written H1, H2, and H3. Of these, H1 may have been h or a glottal stop; H2 was perhaps a pharyngeal spirant like Arabic ḥ in ḥams ‘five’; H3, whatever its other features, was probably voiced. The principal traces they left outside Anatolian are in the quality and length of neighbouring vowels, H2 changing a neighbouring e to a, and probably H3 changing it to o, while all laryngeals lengthened a preceding vowel in the same syllable. In Anatolian, H2 and H3 remained as ḫ, at least in some positions.

When laryngeals between consonants disappeared, a vowel sometimes remained, as in Greek stásis, Sanskrit sthitis, Old English stede ‘a standing (place)’ from Proto-Indo-European *stH2tis. Before the advent of the laryngeal theory, a separate Proto-Indo-European vowel ə (called schwa indogermanicum) was reconstructed to account for these correspondences.

Finally, there were the nasal sounds n and m, the liquids l and r, and the semivowels y and w. When y and w occurred between consonants, they were replaced by the vowels i and u. The nasals and liquids functioning as nuclei of syllables in this position (like the final sounds of English bottom, button, bottle, butter) are traditionally written n̥, m̥, l̥, r̥. Some scholars dispense with these diacritical marks and with the distinction between syllabic i and u and nonsyllabic y and w, but this obscures certain distinctions, such as that between -wn̥- in *ḱwn̥su ‘among dogs,’ Sanskrit śvasu, and -un- in *tund- ‘shove,’ Sanskrit tundate.

Vowels

The vowel system of Proto-Indo-European consisted of the following sounds:

In forming front vowels, the highest point of the tongue is in the front of the mouth; for back vowels, that point is in the back. High vowels are those in which the tongue is highest—closest to the roof of the mouth; mid vowels are made with the tongue between the extremes of high and low.

The four mid vowels participated in a pattern of alternation called “ablaut.” In the course of inflection and word formation roots and suffixes could appear in the “e-grade” (also called “normal grade”; compare Latin ped-is ‘of a foot’ [genitive singular]), “o-grade” (e.g., Greek pód-es ‘feet’), “zero-grade” (e.g., Avestan fra-bd-a- ‘forefoot,’ with -bd- from *-pd-), “lengthened e-grade” (e.g., Latin pēs ‘foot’ [nominative singular] from *pēd-s), and/or “lengthened o-grade” (e.g., English foot, Old English fōt).

There is some evidence for a similar pattern of alternation involving a, ā, and zero. Most instances of apparent a and ā, however, arose by “coloration” of e under the influence of a preceding or following H2 (e.g., Greek ag- ‘lead’ comes from *H2eǵ-, stā- ‘stand’ comes from *stH2-). Some cases of o, ō, and ē are likewise of laryngeal origin (e.g., Greek op- ‘see’ comes from *H3ekw-, dō- ‘give’ comes from *deH3-, thē- ‘put’ comes from *dheH1-). Among the high vowels, i and u did not participate in ablaut alternations but rather functioned primarily as the syllabic realizations of the consonants y and w, as in *leykw- ‘leave,’ zero-grade *likw-, parallel to *derḱ- ‘see,’ zero-grade *dr̥ḱ-. Long ī and ū in the recorded languages derive in large part from sequences of i or u plus laryngeal, as in Latin vīvus ‘alive’ from *gwiH3wós.

The accent just before the breakup of the parent language was apparently mainly one of pitch rather than stress. Each full word had one accented syllable, presumably pronounced on a higher pitch than the others.

Morphology and syntax

Verbal inflection

The Proto-Indo-European verb had three aspects: imperfective, perfective, and stative. Aspect refers to the nature of an action as described by the speaker—e.g., an event occurring once, an event recurring repeatedly, a continuing process, or a state. The difference between English simple and “progressive” verb forms is largely one of aspect—e.g., “John wrote a letter yesterday” (implying that he finished it) versus “John was writing a letter yesterday” (describing an ongoing process, with no implication as to whether it was finished or not).

The imperfective aspect, traditionally called “present,” was used for repeated actions and for ongoing processes or states—e.g., *stí-stH2-(e)- ‘stand up more than once, be in the process of standing up,’ *mn̥-yé- ‘ponder, think,’ *H1es- ‘be.’ The perfective aspect, traditionally called “aorist,” expressed a single, completed occurrence of an action or process—e.g., *steH2- ‘stand up, come to a stop,’ *men- ‘think of, bring to mind.’ The stative aspect, traditionally called “perfect,” described states of the subject—e.g., *ste-stóH2- ‘be in a standing position,’ *me-món- ‘have in mind.’

Verb roots were by themselves either perfective (like *steH2- ‘stand’ and *men- ‘think’) or imperfective (like *H1es- ‘be’). This basic aspect, however, could be reversed by morphological devices such as ablaut, suffixation, and reduplication. The stative aspect was normally marked by reduplication and the o-grade of the root in the indicative singular; it had personal endings that were partly distinct from those of the other two aspects.

From one aspect of a given verb the shape and even the existence of the other two aspects could not be predicted; for example, *H1es- ‘be’ had only the imperfective aspect. Ways of forming imperfectives were especially numerous and often involved, in addition to their imperfective aspectual meaning, some other notion, such as performing the action habitually or repeatedly (iterative), or causing someone else to perform it (causative). One root could thus have several imperfective stems; so to the root *H1er- ‘move’ there were at least a causative form, *H1r̥-new- ‘set in motion,’ and an iterative form, *H1r̥-sḱḥ- ‘go repeatedly.’

The Proto-Indo-European verb was also inflected for mood, by which the speaker could indicate whether he was making statements or inquiries about matters of fact; making predictions, surmises, or wishes about the future or about unreal but imagined situations; or giving commands. Compare English “If John is home now (he is eating lunch)” with the verb is in the indicative mood, discussing a matter of fact, with “If John were home now (he would be eating lunch)” with the verb were in the subjunctive mood, describing an unreal situation. There were two Proto-Indo-European suffixes expressing mood: -e- alternating with -o- for the subjunctive, corresponding roughly in meaning to the English auxiliaries ‘shall’ and ‘will,’ and -yeH1- alternating with -iH1- for the optative, corresponding roughly to English ‘should’ and ‘would.’ Verbs without one of these two suffixes were marked for mood and tense by their personal endings alone.

These personal endings basically expressed the person and number of the verb’s subject, as in Latin amō ‘I love,’ amās ‘you (singular) love,’ amat ‘he or she loves,’ amāmus ‘we love,’ and so on. In the imperfective and perfective aspects there were two sets of endings, distinguishing two voices: active, in which typically the subject was not affected by the action, and mediopassive, in which typically the subject was affected, directly or indirectly. Thus Sanskrit active yájati and mediopassive yájate both mean ‘he sacrifices,’ but the former is said of a priest who performs a sacrifice for the benefit of another, while the latter is said of a layman who hires a priest to perform a sacrifice for him. In the stative aspect there was originally no distinction of voice.

To mark mood and tense, imperfective verbs that did not have a mood suffix distinguished three subtypes of active and mediopassive endings: imperative, primary, and secondary. Verbs with imperative endings belonged to the imperative mood (used for commands)—e.g., *H1s-dhí ‘be (singular),’ *H1és-tu ‘let him be.’ Verbs with primary endings were marked as non-past (present or future) in tense and indicative in mood—e.g., *H1és-ti ‘he is.’ (Indicative mood signifies objective statements and questions.) Verbs with secondary endings were unmarked for tense and mood but were normally used as past indicatives (e.g., *H1és-t ‘he was,’ *gwhén-t ‘he slew’) and to fill out gaps in the imperative paradigm (e.g., *H1és-te or *H1s-té ‘you [plural] were,’ but also ‘be [plural]’; *gwhén-te or *gwhn̥-té ‘you [plural] slew,’ but also ‘slay [plural]’). To mark such forms unambiguously as past indicatives, an augment, usually consisting of the vowel e, could be prefixed—e.g., *é-gwhen-t ‘he slew,’ *é-H1es-t ‘he was.’

Verbs in the perfective aspect without a mood suffix did not occur with primary endings and thus lacked a true present tense. Verbs in the stative aspect substituted a distinctive set of endings for those of the primary set but apparently used the imperative and secondary endings in the usual way to form a stative imperative and a stative past indicative.

Nominal inflection

The inflectional categories of the noun were case, number, and gender. Eight cases can be reconstructed: nominative, for the subject of a verb; accusative, for the direct object; genitive, for the relations expressed by English of; dative, corresponding to the English preposition to, as in “give a prize to the winner”; locative, corresponding to at, in; ablative, from; instrumental, with; and vocative, used for the person being addressed. For examples of some of these see Table 2. Besides singular and plural number, there was a dual number for referring to two items. Each noun belonged to one of three genders: masculine, to which belonged most nouns designating male creatures; feminine, to which belonged most names of female creatures; and neuter, to which belonged only a few words for individual adult living creatures. The gender of nouns not designating living creatures was only partly predictable from their meaning.

Adjectives were nounlike words that varied in gender according to the gender of another noun with which they were in agreement, or, if used by themselves, according to the sex of the entity to which they referred; thus, Latin bonus sermō ‘good speech’ (masculine), bona aetās ‘good age’ (feminine), bonum cor ‘good heart’ (neuter), or bonus ‘a good man,’ bona ‘a good woman,’ bonum ‘a good thing.’ The neuter of an adjective was often identical with the masculine except for having different endings in the nominative and accusative cases. Feminine gender was either completely identical with the masculine or derived from it by means of a suffix, the two commonest being *-eH2- and *-iH2- (*-yeH2-).

Demonstrative, interrogative, relative, and indefinite pronouns were inflected like adjectives, with some special endings. Personal pronouns were inflected very differently. They lacked the category of gender, and they marked number and case (in part) not by endings but by different stems, as is still seen in English singular nominative “I,” but oblique “my,” “me”; plural nominative “we,” but plural oblique “our,” “us.” (The oblique is any case other than nominative or vocative.)

Syntax

Some notable features of Proto-Indo-European syntax were the non-ergative case system, in which the subject of an intransitive verb received the same case marking as the subject (rather than the object) of a transitive verb; concord (agreement) in case, number, and gender between adjective and noun; and the use of singular verbs with neuter plural subjects, as in Greek pánta rheĩ ‘all things flow,’ with the same (singular) verb as ho pótamos rheĩ ‘the river (masculine) flows,’ contrasting with hoi pótamoi rhéousi ‘the rivers flow’ (indicating that neuter plurals were originally collectives and grammatically singular). Proto-Indo-European word order was flexible, but basic declarative sentences typically had the structure subject–object–verb (SOV).

Lexicon and culture

Much less is known about the parent language’s vocabulary than about its phonology and grammar. Sounds and grammatical categories do not easily disappear or undergo radical change in so many daughter languages that their former existence can no longer be detected. It is relatively easy, however, for an individual word to disappear or shift meaning in so many daughter languages that its existence or meaning in the parent language cannot be confidently inferred. Hence, from the linguistic evidence alone, scholars can never say that Proto-Indo-European lacked a word for any particular concept; they can only state the probability that certain items did exist and from these items make inferences about the culture and location in time and space of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.

Thus is it supposed that the Proto-Indo-European community knew and talked about dogs (*ḱwón-), horses (*H1éḱwo-), sheep (*H3éwi-), and almost certainly cows (*gwów-) and pigs (*súH-). Probably all these animals were domesticated. At least one cereal grain was known (*yéwo-), and at least one metal (*H2éyos). There were vehicles (*wóǵho-) with wheels (*kwékwlo-), pulled by teams joined by yokes (*yugó-). Honey was known, and it probably formed the basis of an alcoholic drink (*mélit-, *médhu) related to the English mead. Numerals up through 100 (*ḱm̥tóm) were in use. All this suggests a people with a well-developed Neolithic (characterized by simple agriculture and polished stone tools) or even Chalcolithic (copper- or bronze-using) technology.

The divergence of Indo-European languages

Linguists have not found a reliable and precise way to determine from linguistic evidence alone the date at which any set of related languages must have begun diverging. The best that can be done is to estimate the degree of difference between the languages in question, taking into account all that is known about them, and then compare this estimate with the estimated degrees of difference within families of languages—such as the Romance family—whose actual time of divergence is approximately known. Using this sort of “dead reckoning,” it can be said that the earliest attested Indo-European languages—Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, and Greek—are different enough that the parent language must have been split into several distinct languages before 3000 bc, but similar enough that the first split into separate languages is not likely to have been earlier than about 4500 bc.

For further progress the linguistic findings must be correlated with archaeological evidence. Linguistic, historical, and geographic considerations suggest that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a relatively small and homogeneous Eurasian population group that underwent significant expansion and fragmentation in the period around 4000 bc. Some scholars believe that the Indo-Europeans were the bearers of the Kurgan (Barrow) culture of the Black Sea and the Caucasus and west of the Urals.

The Kurgan culture, however, was only one of a number of related steppe cultures extending across the entire Black Sea–Caspian Sea region, an area that was transformed about 4000 bc by the advent of horse-drawn wheeled vehicles and related innovations. It is probably best, therefore, to follow J.TP. Mallory (In Search of the Indo-Europeans [1989]) in locating the speakers of Proto-Indo-European among the populations of this region, but not to attempt a more precise identification until further evidence is available.

Remote relationship of Indo-European to the Uralic languages is not improbable. Geographically, the earliest reconstructible locations of the two families are contiguous; lexically, there are strong resemblances in a number of basic words or word parts, including personal, demonstrative, interrogative, and relative pronouns, personal endings of verbs, the accusative case ending -m, and such words as those for ‘water’ and ‘name’; typologically, the families are fairly similar—e.g., both have many suffixes, but few or no prefixes or infixes (elements inserted within words). The resemblances, however, are too few to permit the reconstruction of a common “Indo-Uralic” parent language; the two families, if they are related at all, must have separated thousands of years before the breakup of Proto-Indo-European.

If Indo-European is related to other language families—e.g., to Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages) or to Kartvelian (which includes Georgian)—it must have diverged from them much earlier than it diverged from Uralic, because the number of cogent resemblances is much smaller. There is no significant evidence at present for a “Nostratic” superfamily embracing these and other groups.

Characteristic developments of Indo-European languages

As Proto-Indo-European was splitting into the dialects that were to become the first generation of daughter languages, different innovations spread over different territories.

Changes in phonology

Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, and Albanian agree in changing the palatal stops *ḱ, *ǵ, and *ǵh into spirants (s, ś, th, etc.) or affricates—e.g., Sanskrit aśri- ‘sharp edge,’ Old Church Slavonic ostrŭ ‘sharp,’ Armenian asełn ‘needle,’ Albanian atheteathëtë‘bitter’ beside Greek ákros ‘tip,’ Latin acidus ‘biting,’ all from a basic element *H2eḱ- ‘sharp, pointed.’ (Spirants, also called fricatives, are sounds produced with audible friction as a result of the airstream passing through a narrow, but unstopped, passage in the mouth—e.g., English s, f, v. Affricates are sounds that begin as stops, with complete stoppage of the airstream, but are released as spirants, or fricatives—e.g., the ch in church, the j in jam.) The languages that change the palatal stops to spirants or affricates are known as “satem” languages, from the Avestan word satəm ‘hundred’ (Proto-Indo-European *kmtóm), which illustrates the change. The languages that preserve the palatal stops as k-like sounds are known as “centum” languages, from centum (/kentum/), the corresponding word in Latin. The satem languages are not geographically separated from one another by any recorded languages that preserve the palatals as stops; it is therefore inferred that the change to affricates (whence later spirants) occurred just once and spread over a cohesive dialect area of Proto-Indo-European.

Of the languages that share this change, however, Balto-Slavic shares with Germanic (including English) an m in certain case endings where other Indo-European languages, including Indo-Iranian, Armenian, and Albanian, have bh or a sound regularly developed from bh. Examples of the m ending include English the-m and Old Church Slavonic tě-mŭ ‘to those ones’; the bh and related sounds (ph, v, b) are illustrated in the following: Sanskrit té-bhyas ‘to those ones,’ Armenian noro-vkʿ ‘with new ones,’ Albanian male-ve ‘to mountains,’ Greek ókhes-phin ‘with chariots,’ Latin omni-bus ‘for all.’ Because Balto-Slavic and Germanic are neighbours, it is inferred that m replaced bh in these case endings just once in the parent language and that the area over which this innovation spread only partly overlapped the area that adopted affricated pronunciation of the palatals.

This pattern is general for changes dating from the time the parent language was breaking up into distinct languages. Each of the resulting languages shares some innovations with some of its neighbours, but only rarely do different innovations shared by two or more branches of Indo-European cover exactly the same territory.

Once the dialects had become differentiated enough to be distinct languages—certainly by 2500 bc in most cases—each largely went its own way, and agreements in developments since then are due either to borrowing across language boundaries (as in the notable convergences between Modern Greek, Albanian, Romanian, and the southernmost Slavic languages) or to parallel but independent workings out of the same base material.

In phonology, the most striking changes have been loss or reduction in many languages of final or unaccented syllables, and loss in several languages of certain consonants between vowels, often followed by contraction of the resulting vowel sequence. Thus words in modern Indo-European languages are often much shorter than their Proto-Indo-European ancestors—e.g., English ‘four,’ Armenian čʿorkʿ, colloquial Persian čar ‘four’ from *kwetwóres; French vit (pronounced vi) ‘lives’ from *gwíH3weti; Russian dvestí ‘two hundred’ from *duwóyH1 ḱm̥tóyH1.

Changes in morphology

As a result of the fact that much of the marking of Proto-Indo-European inflectional categories was done in final syllables, loss and reduction of these syllables have often had serious grammatical consequences. In the noun, loss of endings has generally led to loss or great reduction of the case and gender systems, while ways have generally been found to salvage the distinction between singular and plural. In Modern Persian, for example, where all final syllables have been lost, the old case and gender distinctions have disappeared also, but plural number is still regularly marked, either with -an (originally the genitive plural ending of some nouns) or with -ha (of obscure origin).

In the verb, where more endings originally had two syllables, loss of final syllables has had less serious consequences for morphology. Even here, however, some languages, including English, have totally or almost totally given up the marking of subject by personal endings. Compare English “I, we, you, they love” and “he, she loves” with the Spanish conjugation for ‘love’—amo, amas, ama, amamos, amáis, aman—or the Russian version—ljubljú, ljúbish, ljúbit, ljúbim, ljúbite, ljúbjat.

Changes in noun inflection have generally involved simplification. Almost everywhere the dual number has been lost; in many languages the noun genders have been reduced from three to two (as in French, Swedish, Lithuanian, and Hindī) or lost entirely (as in English, Armenian, and Bengali). Only Slavic has complicated the gender system by imposing on the inherited distinctions contrasts of animate versus inanimate or of personal versus nonpersonal.

Everywhere except in the oldest Indo-Iranian languages the original eight Indo-European cases have suffered reduction. Proto-Germanic had only six cases, the functions of ablative (place from which) and locative (place in which) being taken over by constructions of preposition plus the dative case. In Modern English these are reduced to two cases in nouns, a general case that does duty for the vocative, nominative, dative, and accusative (“Henry, did Bill give John the letter?”) and a possessive case continuing the old genitive (“Bill’s letter”). In languages such as French and Welsh, nouns are no longer inflected for case at all. In some languages, to be sure, nouns have begun fusing with words placed directly after the nouns to create new case systems, coexisting with relics of the old. Thus, Old Lithuanian had in addition to seven inherited cases an illative (place into), made by adding -n(a) to the accusative (peklosna ‘into hell’), an allative (place to, toward), made by adding -p(i) to the genitive (Jesausp ‘to Jesus’), and an adessive (place at which), made by adding -p(i) to the locative (Joniep ‘in John’).

Changes in the verb have been more complex. Besides loss or merger of old categories, many new forms have been created and many old forms have acquired new values. In Ancient Greek the focus of the stative aspect (perfect) has largely shifted from the present state (“he is dead”) to the previous event that led to this state (“he has died”). As a result, the perfect came to mean the same as the perfective past (aorist), and it has therefore disappeared from Modern Greek. New forms created in Ancient Greek include future and future perfect tenses, based on the desiderative present forms (such as “he wants to walk”) of the parent language.

In Germanic the principal new creation was the weak past tense (ending in a t or d), such as English loved, thought, German liebte, dachte, made by combining the verb stem with a past tense of the Germanic verb for ‘do.’ (The strong past tense formed by vowel alternations, like “sing, sang,” “run, ran” comes from the Proto-Indo-European stative aspect.)

In some languages participles have come to function as finite verbs. Thus in Hindī ādmī laṛkī-ko dekhtā ‘the man sees the girl,’ dekhtā ‘sees’ is etymologically a participle ‘seeing,’ agreeing in number and gender with the subject ādmī ‘man.’ In the past tense, ādmī-ne laṛkī dekhī ‘the man saw the girl,’ the verb dekhī is etymologically a past passive participle ‘seen,’ agreeing in gender and number with the object laṛkī ‘girl,’ and the subject is marked with an instrumental ending.

Vocabulary changes

Changes in vocabulary have been even greater than those in sounds and grammar. Words in modern Indo-European languages have several sources. They may be recognizable loanwords, such as English skunk, chain, and inch (from Algonquian, French, and Latin, respectively); they may have been formed within the history or prehistory of the language itself, such as English radar and rightness; they may be of obscure origin, such as English drink, which is common Germanic but has no cognates outside Germanic, or boy, which is peculiar to English and Frisian; or they may be inherited words that have changed meaning, such as English merry from Proto-Indo-European *mr̥ǵhú- ‘short.’ Only a small fraction of the vocabulary can be traced back to words that can confidently be asserted to have existed in the parent language with approximately their present meaning. The same is true, albeit in a lesser degree, even for the oldest recorded Indo-European languages. None has more than a few hundred words and roots that are clearly inherited from the parent language without essential change of meaning. Table 1 gives examples of words that have been widely retained with little change. Typically they include pronouns; nouns, verbs, and adjectives of relatively simple and ubiquitous meaning; numerals; and simple adverbs and prepositions.

Non-Indo-European influence on the family

Indo-European languages, like all languages, have always been subject to influence from neighbouring languages, both related and unrelated.

The influence of non-Indo-European languages on the sounds and grammar of Proto-Indo-European is not demonstrable, partly because there is no direct evidence about the languages that were in contact with Indo-European before roughly 3000 bc. It can be surmised, however, that some words are loans—e.g., *péleḱu- ‘ax,’ a word for an object likely to be imported or learned of from neighbours with superior technology and which is not analyzable into a known Indo-European root plus a known Indo-European suffix.

When Indo-European languages have been carried within historic times into areas occupied by speakers of other languages, they have generally taken over a number of loanwords, as with English and Spanish in the Americas or Dutch in South Africa. Aside from the special case of pidgin and creole languages, however, there has been comparatively little effect on sounds and grammar. These have been significantly affected within historic times only when an Indo-European language has been spoken in prolonged close contact with non-Indo-European speakers, as with Ossetic (an Iranian language) in the Caucasus, or when its speakers have been very strongly influenced culturally by speakers of a non-Indo-European language, as with Persian, in which Arabic plays much the same role as Latin does in English.

In prehistoric times most branches of Indo-European were carried into territories presumably or certainly occupied by speakers of non-Indo-European languages, and it is reasonable to suppose that these languages had some effect on the speech of the newcomers. For the lexicon, this is indeed demonstrable in Hittite and Greek, at least. It is much less clear, however, that these non-Indo-European languages affected significantly the sounds and grammar of the Indo-European languages that replaced them. Perhaps the best case is India, where certain grammatical features shared by Indo-European and Dravidian languages appear to have spread from Dravidian to Indo-European rather than vice versa. For most other branches of Indo-European languages any attempt to claim prehistoric influence of non-Indo-European languages on sounds and grammar is rendered almost impossible because of ignorance of the non-Indo-European languages with which they might have been in contact.